Over the past 20 years, aggregate measures of global inequality have changed little even if significant structural changes have been observed. High growth rates of China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while the stagnation in many African countries caused them to fall behind. Using the...

The present study uses the GIDD, a CGE-microsimulation model for Global Income Distribution Dynamics, to understand the ex-ante dynamics of global income distribution. Three main robust results emerge. First, under a set of realistic assumptions, there will be a reduction in global income...

Who benefits from public spending? Who bears the burden of taxation? How desirable is the distribution of net benefits from the operation of a tax-benefit system? This paper surveys basic concepts, methods, and modeling approaches commonly used to address these issues in the context of fiscal...

Poverty reduction has become a fundamental objective of development, and therefore a metric for assessing the effectiveness of various interventions. Economic growth can be a powerful instrument of income poverty reduction. This creates a need for meaningful ways of assessing the poverty impact...

The importance of distributional issues in policymaking creates a need for empirical tools to assess the social impact of economic shocks and policies. This paper reviews some of the modeling approaches that are currently in use at the World Bank and other international financial institutions....

This paper relies on the recently developed Maquette for Millennium Development Goals Simulations (MAMS) model to assess the consistency of alternative scaling-up and policy packages for growth and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in Ghana. In the baseline scenario, Ghana's strong...

Starting with a general impact indicator as an evaluation criterion, The author offers an integrative framework for a unified discussion of various concepts and measures of pro-poor growth emerging from the current literature. He shows that whether economic growth is considered pro-poor depends...